the draft was gay

Has there ever been a kid in the history of the OHL who has made it to the U-17 training camp and never get drafted? I want to know if i'm the first. So of it's basically the top 80 kids there I don't see how that works out.

If anything it shows that the selection process at your camp was not based on how you played over the season but instead on how you played in the camp. Congratulations on having a great camp! Maybe your coach on one of the U17 teams will be an OHL scout who will remember you for next year, that seems to be the way to get drafted.

Monday » May 7 » 2007

Bantam draft not end-all for players

Doug McConachie
The StarPhoenix

Thursday, May 03, 2007

There's no bigger day for a 15-year-old wannabe hockey player than today, when teams pick prospects at the WHL bantam draft.

These kids, who may have yet to figure out what they want to be in life -- bankers, engineers, truck drivers or plumbers or, perchance, hockey players -- instantly get tossed into the fish bowl as kids who might one day play in the NHL.

Might is an awfully big word. For a great many, the NHL is a dream that will never be realized.

Overnight, it becomes a ridiculous amount of pressure they have to live with. They become instant celebrities and, for the rest of their hockey lives, they are targets. Peers build them up, jealous opponents knock them down.

Surprisingly, most of these youngsters handle this pressure extremely well.

The kids grow up fast, usually because of a good upbringing, but also because junior hockey teams over the past decade or two have really grown up as well. Long gone are the days when education for hockey players was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. No longer do players show up out of shape at fall training camps, vomiting over the boards and working their way into playing condition. Hockey is now a serious business.

Education is now as important as goal scoring. Nutrition and conditioning are a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year job. Players are trusted to billets who become second parents. And when you meet these kids -- as sports journalists do on a regular basis -- you are almost always impressed with how mature, professional and intelligent they are.

So, despite all the odds, the ridiculous draft age and the wide range of backgrounds these kids come from, the kids do thrive. Most -- when they turn 20 and look back on their hockey careers -- wouldn't change a thing.

But as often as it is said and written, being selected in the draft is just a step in the process.

It identifies players who have shown potential, but it doesn't guarantee anything beyond that. No. 1 draft picks fizzle. Last-round draft picks succeed and, on every junior team, more than half of those in the lineup were not drafted.

Those who will be singled out today will unquestionably get an extra look or two during training camp and may have the edge when teams have to decide between two players. But it does not give you an automatic spot on the team.

In all, 200 or 225 kids will be singled out for special attention, leaving several thousand other youngsters disappointed and wondering, maybe even believing, their hockey careers are over. If only they could flash forward a year or two and realize how wrong that thinking is.

Being ignored today does not mean being shut out. Both the WHL and the NHL are filled with players who were never drafted, just as teams still have spots available for players who they did take, but were never able to rise to that level. Every team has 50 protected players. Kids are dropped and replaced on that list continually.

The Memorial Cup-bound Vancouver Giants have in their lineup only three of 11 bantam draft players they picked in 2003. The Medicine Hat Tigers, who will also complete in this year's Memorial Cup, have five of 11 players they selected that year. Ditto the Saskatoon Blades -- three kids, 11 picks. Not one of the 10 players taken in 2002 wears a Blades jersey today. The hockey ice is littered with mistakes by scouts.

Therefore, the bantam draft has to be put into that context.

The Kamloops Blazers -- and, for that matter, every other WHL team -- didn't think Jarome Iginla was worth picking in the bantam draft in 1992. History has proven how wrong every team was with that non-decision.

dmcconachie@sp.canwest.com

© The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) 2007






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